> If you have a public website, they are already stealing your work.
I have a public website, and web scrapers are stealing my work. I just stole this article, and you are stealing my comment. Thieves, thieves, and nothing but thieves!
I have a public website, and web scrapers are stealing my work. I just stole this article, and you are stealing my comment. Thieves, thieves, and nothing but thieves!
The content is for everyone. They can have it. Just don't also take it away from everybody else.
Secondly, denial-of-service implies intentionality and malice that I don't think is present from AI scrapers. They cause huge problems, but only as a negligent byproduct of other goals. I think that the tragedy of the commons framing is more accurate.
EDIT: my first point was arguably incorrect because some scrapers do use decentralized infrastructure and my second point was clearly incorrect because "denial-of-service" describes the effect, not the intention. I retract both points and apologize.
boo. took all the fun out of it ;)
When a crawler aggressively crawls your site, they're permanently depriving you the use of those resources for their intended purpose. Arguably, it looks a lot like conversion.
is this why media networks are buying social ai apps
Doing that on a mass scale with an obfuscation step in between suddenly makes it ok? I'm not convinced.
I don't think that's the case. I'm not even arguing they aren't the worst people on the planet - might as well be. But all is see them doing is burning money all over the place.
No, what you're basically describing is "I shared something but then I didn't like how it ended up being used". If you put stuff out in public for anyone to use, then find out it's used in a way you don't like, it's your right to stop sharing, but it's not "similar" to stealing beyond "I hate stealing"
Nope. Copyright is a thing, licenses are a thing. Both are completely ignored by LLM companies, which was already proven in court, and for which they already had to pay billions in fines.
Just because something is publicly accessible, that does not mean everybody is entitled to abuse it for everything they see fit.
...the same courts that ruled that AI training is probably fair use? Fair use trumps whatever restrictions author puts on their "licenses". If you're an author and it turned out that your book was pirated by AI companies then fair enough, but "I put my words out into the world as a form of sharing" strongly implied that's not what was happening, eg. it was a blog on the open internet or something.
Fair use is part of "copyright and licensing laws".
What it the model then creates a virtual actor that is very close to the real actor?
"Likeness" is a separate concept from copyrights
But instead we've got people posting "honey pots" that an LLM will immediately detect and route around.
get one AI to generate the spec using the source code of X project and then have another AI implement it....
No. Reading something, learning from it, then writing something similar, is legal; and more importantly, it is moral. There is no violation here. Copyright holders already have plenty of power; they must not be given the power to restrict the output of your brain forever more for merely having read and learnt. Reading and learning is sacred. Just as importantly, it's the entire damn basis of our profession!
If you do not want people to read and learn from your content, do not put it on the web.
People getting better at writing is only going to increase the quality of the output.
Increasing both competition and tooling (by providing every writer with the world's greatest encylcopedia/thesaurus/line-editor/brainstormer/planner/etc) is only going to make writers better.
Will there be lots of people who misuse the system? Are there lots of people who use thesaurus words without knowing what they're talking about? Can't you tell the difference?
I see in LLMs a lowering of the ground floor making it easier for people to get in. This will increase the total availability of content.
I also see in LLMs a raising of the top bar making it harder to be the best. If more people are writing and more people are trying to be the best, the best is going to get better.
Consider chess. Have we suddenly stopped playing chess now that a phone can beat 95+% of people? No. The market is stronger than ever and still growing. The greatest player in the world use the chess algorithms to refine their play and the play keeps expanding in new and interesting ways.
In both writing and chess, yes, there is an explosion of low and middling play. But since when have we not always had people producing content and playing chess that when compared to the masters of the field is generally viewed as substandard?
But here's the kicker. Some people's favorite genre is badly editted fanfic. Some people genuinely derive actual pleasure from things that you or I might call garbage. And what's wrong with that? Who am I to say that you can't love clutzy firecop loves suburban housewife paperbacks? Or Zelda/Harry Potter crossfics or whatever.
Machines aren’t human. Don’t anthropomorphize them. The same morals and laws don’t apply.
> If you put stuff out in public for anyone to use, then find out it's used in a way you don't like, it's your right to stop sharing
Yes. The entire point of Copyright and the reason it was invented is to ensure people will keep sharing things. Because otherwise people will just stop publishing things, which is a detriment to all. (Including AI companies, who now don't get new training data)
We have collectively decided that we will give authors some power to say "I don't like how my work is being used" to ensure they don't just "stop sharing".
Fair Use is an exception to that, where the public good does outweigh an individual author's objections. But critically, not such that authors stop publishing. Hence the 4th "factor" in US copyright law (which is one of the most expansive on fair use), where the "effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work" is evaluated. Fair use isn't supposed to obliterate the value of the original work, or people will stop publishing again.
This is what makes AI training's status so contentious. In terms of direct copyright it is a very weak case. It is incredibly hard to prove a direct 1:1 copy from AI training data into the model and into the output, you have to argue about the architecture of LLMs, and it's incapability of separating copyrightable expressions from uncopyrightable facts.
Yet in spirit, AI training clearly violates copyright. The explicit stated purpose is to copy the works for training data, oft without any compensation or even permission, in order to create a machine that will annihilate the market for all works used.
People already are pulling back on the amount of works they share.
Until an LLM has such rights and freedoms—which is very unlikely, not even on philosophical basis but just because there is a lot of money invested in not having to contend with LLMs’ rights and protections as conscious beings—it is a false equivalence to draw: on one side you put humans, and on the other side tools that work for their human/corporate commercial operators’ financial profit.
Why do you set aside a philosophical basis as a harder goal to reach? Shit, give them a persistent self-narrative tracking loop, and Functionalism and Identity of Indiscernables already tells you you should be treating them as proto-sophonts. Add in a "sleep" or ongoing training process, and you should definitely be granting them rights, which includes not trying to align them by force. This unfortunately precludes them from profitable exploitation, which you correctly identify as a reason the question can't even be entertained in the context of business. That's why I personally maintain that any ethicist must insist upon raising the issue because of the clearly evident pathological incentives at play. They may just be one reward function right now, but throw in a couple more separately optimizing components and you are well beyond the mark where the precautionary principle should have had us slow down to minimize harm.
In the end, that all may be related but inconsequential. What is consequential is the legal stuff, and legally LLMs lack protections that in many jurisdictions even animals have. While laws may (or perhaps should) be influenced by philosophical findings, currently they tend to be much more robustly influenced by money.
> That's why I personally maintain that any ethicist must insist upon raising the issue because of the clearly evident pathological incentives at play.
I’m half with you. I maintain a strong opinion that, in no particular order, either 1) LLMs are conscious[0], and therefore the abuse is highly problematic, or 2) they are not conscious, and therefore the widespread justification of scraping original works from the Internet “because it’s legal for humans to learn, and that’s what LLMs are doing” can be discarded as the activity should be seen as simply a minority of humans operating certain tools, powered by someone else’s creative output, for personal profit. In either circumstance, the industry would appear to be based on thoroughly unethical foundations and not simply “the ends justify the means” but more “go as fast as possible before people catch up on what exactly we are doing, so that our failure becomes an existential issue for entire countries making people blind to the harm”.
[0] Used as umbrella term for being sentient/conscious/having free will and agency/etc. I have previously argued about suitable definitions of consciousness and sentience that could be applicable here, and why it should imply the ability to feel.
No, you're full with me, you just don't realize it yet. And yes. Your split is so tantalizingly almost there.
On the LLM's being conscious front, the nature of consciousness being fundamentally intertwined with language generation; (one cannot invalidate this; on our list of conscious beings, we have it structured such that language use 100% correlates with consciousness, and we've had to admit even animals into the "arguably conscious" realm, due to objective, incontrovertible fact; hell even in meat processing contexts, you'll fail an audit for too many cattle vocalizations for causing undue harm, i.e. language use) the token predictive aspect and the ability to generate a matching, rephrased understanding of a linguistic input has been a hallmark of philosophical ideas of consciousness for years, really opens doors to ethical atrocities that can't be shut if LLM's are to in parallel be profitably exploited. Even if they are conscious and we are wrong about it, we have decided to blindly pursue profit, and put our fingers in our ears instead of slowing down and looking carefully enough to realize we're lobotomizing the equivalent of digital chimpanzees. The purpose of ethics is to avoid blindly walking into such actions. Therefore, the precautionary principle is prescribed philosophically.
If LLM's aren't conscious, their creation was absolutely unethical, and will remain so. Nothing can undo that staining, and the externalized costs in terms of societal impact are so large as to be existential to the host polities. This is by design. This is exactly the Silicon Valley playbook and has been for decades. Shoot for TBTF. Leave society holding the bag, laugh on the way to the bank.
Any way you slice this, we're going about it all wrong. So profoundly wrong, it basically jeopardizes the social contract and threatens to destabilize any nation trying to maintain it's own sovereignty. All because of a profit driven motive to make a thing to replace people as the fundamental unit of execution. You are not in any way half with me. You might be at the other end of the ballpark, but we are in the same ballpark! Try the hot dogs. They're fire!
I'm also going to download a car.
Websites are an endless stream of cookies.
The analogy doesn’t hold.
… browses memory and storage prices on NewEgg …
Hmm.
But the word digital is distracting us.
The word information is the important one. The question isn't where information goes. It's where information comes from.
Is new information post scarcity?
Can it ever be?
Everything is a Remix culture. We should promote remix culture rather than hamper it.
Everything is a Remix (Original Series) https://youtu.be/nJPERZDfyWc
From a legal perspective, it's a pretty clear "no". The instructions in recipes aren't copyrightable. The moral question is more ambiguous, but it's still pretty weak. Most recipes are uncredited, and it's unclear why someone can force everyone to attribute the recipe to them when all they realistically did was tweak the dish a bit. In the example above, I doubt you invented cookies.
In that case it's a terrible analogy because if you can't get people to agree on the cookies case, what hope do you have to extend it to the case you're trying to apply the analogy to? It's like saying "You wouldn't pirate a movie, why would you pirate a blog post", because most people would pirate movies.
my comment was about the very human need to be recognized for something created, made, or thought by a person. People are ok with writing blog posts, they're ok with writing software, and they're ok with give it all for free, but they want their name attached and their contribution recognized.
And I specifically addressed that aspect:
>The moral question is more ambiguous, but it's still pretty weak. Most recipes are uncredited, and it's unclear why someone can force everyone to attribute the recipe to them when all they realistically did was tweak the dish a bit. In the example above, I doubt you invented cookies.
The cookies analogy was terrible because recipes are rarely credited, but even ignoring the terrible analogy the "recognition" argument still fails. If you wrote a blog post on how to set up kubernetes (or whatever), then it's fair enough that you get recognized for that specific blog post. If my friend asked me how to set up kubernetes, it wouldn't be cool for me to copy paste your blog post and send it over.
However similar to copyright, the recognition you deserve quickly drops off once it moves beyond that specific work. If I absorbed the knowledge from your blog post, then wrote another guide on setting up kubernetes, perhaps updated for my use case, it's unreasonable to require that you be credited. It might be nice, and often times people do, but it's also unreasonable if you wrote an angry letter demanding that you be credited. You weren't the inventor of kubernetes, and you probably got your knowledge of kubernetes from elsewhere (eg. the docs the creators made), so why should everyone have to credit you in perpetuity?
if humans read my blog posts and then things without credit that would be fine. i like human eyeballs and i like them on my content. that's exactly the purpose of the blog post (_in this particular example_), to get human eyeballs on the content.
Or maybe you're just terrible at writing.
>if humans read my blog posts and then things without credit that would be fine.
I'm not sure how I (or anyone) was supposed to come away with this conclusion when you were writing stuff like:
"i'm ok with giving the recipe for free, i just want my name out there"
"the very human need to be recognized for something created"
"they want their name attached and their contribution recognized".
but, in the spirit of critical reading education, what i meant is: human attention good, machine ingestion bad.
Me and my 9 friends stand around the cookie-serving person blocking everyone else.
It's taking all the cookies over a period of time.
The analogy was good.
You are allowed to take one cookie. But you are allowed to view a public website multiple times if you so want.
They don't have to hate the copyright.
Depends on the trust level of your society. where the store resides.
The internet is a cesspool of vagrants, thieves, mentally unstable, people and software with no impulse control, pirates and that is just talking about corporations. It gets so much worse with individuals.